Friday, 13 December 2013

It is very common these days to see shortened links to be used on various social media. such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, etc. and this is mostly for convenience.

However, from a security perspective, these links may pose a threat to the end users. There are cases where these URL shorteners services were used deceive the users and click on malicious links. Some of the most well-known URL Shortener services are the following bitly.com, goo.gl, ow.ly, bit.do, tinyurl.com but many others exist as well. Some of them will try to protect you from visiting known malicious links but it is always a good thing to be able to check a shortened link (URL) yourself.The following websites do exactly that. They will allow you to reverse the shortened URL and check where it is intended to redirect you beforehand.